


The Other Family

by forever_undecided



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: F/M, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-19
Updated: 2020-07-19
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:26:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25376875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forever_undecided/pseuds/forever_undecided
Summary: James visits a brothel in Calcutta and realizes something unpleasant.
Kudos: 7





	The Other Family

Her Majesty’s Empire is the greatest that the world has ever seen. It stretches from the ancient Far East, where language and agriculture first began, to the untamed whiteness in the west, through the fiery blaze of noon in Calcutta, all the way to the eternal ice and snow at the two poles. I’m sure you are familiar with it as a creeping mass on any map. On yellowed paper or in a newly printed encyclopedia, unfurled in even the smallest library, schoolroom, or trading office in the meanest corner of the world, one could find themselves located by that ink. I’m sure it all feels bloodless. Remote. The empire is vast and in some of its corners, Her Majesty is little more than a spectre and that life continues the way it did fifty or one hundred years ago. You speak the same language and pray to the same strange gods as your ancestors did when they had a red queen or a black king. Or you may be English, like myself, but never have stepped outside the borders of where you were born. So, although the empire is your world, you would have passed through like a spider in a grand house. Or like a glancing carp in the pond that lies before the veranda, knowing nothing of the water that has given you life. 

As I attain the eighteenth year of my life in Her Majesty’s Navy, I feel compelled to speak (figuratively, silently, into the secret-keeping folds of so many sheets of paper) of the strangeness that I have borne witness to, a strangeness that teems and ferments at the crinkled borders where we meet that which is not us. Or, suffice it to say, where the fingertip of the empire touches the soft and yielding flesh of that which lies subject to it. Long had I believed that we would trade, and in trading, teach. Those who babbled would learn to speak and then walk alongside us. But what I have seen is a second empire that has grown like an ever-expanding set of tree roots. Except that the tree root is the tree and this empire, that formed and budded under the blanket of the first, has taken some part of the tree, but was also moulded in the image of the earth. 

But you must be growing confused. I know I am. These pages will almost certainly be cast into the fire, or maybe into the sea and weighted with a rock, so I shall be plain. 

The seed of my revelation was planted in a brothel just two days ago. I can see you already, whoever you may be, shrinking in disgust and throwing these pages away as if you were afraid they carried disease or some other, less gross but deeper taint. I wish you wouldn’t. I am only a man (and now, only a voice, on a journey to cross the silence), and I had needs, for which easier opportunities to satisfy were piled up on the altar of our immense project. With mine own eyes I have seen miraculous things and my hands have touched fortresses older than any to be found in England, but like all officers in the service, I have taken the burdens of violence upon my own soul for the glory of our nation. Peace of mind traded for a greater peace. We all have to unburden ourselves eventually. And evidence of our heavy fire is in ports all over the world. There is nothing better than a woman’s touch to bring forgetfulness.

Of course, it’s never just women. But those other things are few, and can be passed over without remark. Yes, even here, I maintain my silence.

So … it all began in a brothel. I had been in Calcutta for two days and having found The Clio, was completely free for the next two weeks. I did what any sailor does when he has free time and shore leave.

The house was large and old and was built in a curious way that allowed as much air to go through it while maintaining the sense that there were walls. Yellowed mango leaves hung over the doorway and a lazy mongrel dog dozed on the threshold. It was painted in curious shades of ochre with curlicues of faded magenta and purple. The air was growing opaque and hordes of flying insects were taking wing, and the streets were similarly crowded with human faces. Stepping inside was a relief and the sludgy heat was the same as the sludgy heat outside. Five girls lounged on low wooden chairs. There was a thick, sweet smell that crept all over like a smog. A small child appeared from one side of the parlour and disappeared into a corridor, she was holding a tray. I felt very tired and was about to fold myself into an empty chair when the madam appeared. She was as shrivelled and ancient as the Libyan Sibyl. Wrapped in a dark-yellow saree, she put me in mind of a dead chrysalis. We spoke a little, I cannot remember what I asked for or if she simply divined what I wanted, then she wobbled over to one of the dreaming girls and shook her by the shoulder.

I followed the girl into a room. The corridor was dark and the room was only a little better lit. She struck a match and lighted two lamps before she turned around. She was pretty in a way that was uncommon in India. Her skin and eyes were strangely light and her hair looked finer than those on the women in the street. It occurred to me, slowly, that she would cost me a lot, so I stepped forward and pulled her toward the light to have a better look. She went easily. We did not speak. She was very young but hardly unpracticed and the whole thing went off very well. Afterward, I wanted some wine and she dressed and went to get it. And that was when I heard what I should never have heard.

A small cry started up in the dark corner at the foot of the bed. I thought I imagined it, having been poisoned by the fumes that lived in this place. But the cries only became louder and then my eyes became accustomed to the darkness, and there, at the end of the bed was a bassinet. I had seen an infant die in my last port. Had it followed me here?

I looked into the bassinet. The child inside was somewhat older than my poor friend’s late son. When it caught sight of me, it stopped crying and fell silent. The eyes were wide and dark, questioning. I would have held out a finger for it to grasp, but my hands were both quite dirty. She must have been a fallen woman, then, one of different stock than the crowd outside, brought low by an ill-judged affair. I registered distantly that I was gritting my teeth.

She came back while I was looking into the bassinet. I heard her low noise of vague alarm. She placed her hands on my shoulders in apology and when I stepped back, she stroked the infant’s cheek and lifted it into her arms. She was feeling its bottom.

“Your wine is there.”

I ignored her. I was transfixed by the child’s eyes. They were heavy on me.

“How old is he?”

“Three months.”

“How long have you been here?”

She gave me a look of undisguised scorn.

“A long time.”

The sweat had curdled on my skin and then everything smelled of curdled sweat. I judged it time to leave.

The child and the woman were both a record of something strange that is happening every day, and this is a record of that. And in this woman, I stumbled upon a mystery that I had hitherto skipped over blithely and with which, God willing, the world is finally opening to me.

I was on shore leave in Singapore. It was a small reprieve before some of us would die in Chingkiang, and so we intended to use it to the hilt. I had never been to that island before, we had only five days and few friends and the place was tiny and poor. So we went looking for a brothel and found one almost by accident. My friends and I were in the parlour, just waiting, when a flurry of voices erupted somewhere in the wings. There was one familiar voice. I am, by my own humble admission, rather a master of discretion, so I gently suggested that my friends should be off and avoid any trouble. And then I set off in the direction of those voices. And in a room that was far dirtier and smaller than the one I had two days ago, I found the man whose voice I knew. And a small child. And an old woman. He was indecent. The child was covered in a blanket and hunched over. When he caught sight of me, there was only relief in his eyes. Now, he was my friend and his father was an important man and I knew he had always been drawn to troublesome things. Rumour is a destructive force, even with a life lived in the light. I left the brothel relieved of half a year’s pay and his frantic pleas in my ear as he ran alongside me. I told him to think nothing of it and set it from my own mind.

That child floats up in front of me, like a drowned woman rising from the pond. The air turns blue and I can smell dinner cooking somewhere, but I’m not hungry. The woman holds her baby and dances slowly at the edge of my vision. Its skin is almost milky. Both carry unknown lineages and as I strain to see them in my mind’s eye, I see a vast family, scattered across the map, that second empire that was seeded by the first. And in this invisible family, I see myself, distorted and repeating, so that in all my future travels, I shall never be at ease. I can sense them already, following me, they are soft-skulled abortions, or blind and pocked with disease. Their voices are a chorus of blurred murmurations and their footsteps, the shuffle made by twisted legs. A continent of twisted bodies and twisted souls, and they all call me Father.


End file.
